When defining your ad strategy, it’s vital to craft a plan that meets your client’s requirements while achieving healthcare campaign goals and objectives. Healthcare Professional (HCP) media plans created in the Planner app give you powerful insights into your strategy’s potential reach and impressions once those parameters are layered onto your campaigns. You can pre-optimize your audience and targeting details to help ensure each campaign spends in full—all without allocating resources to test-and-learn budgets. This includes segmenting HCPs based on factors such as medical specialty, geographic location, and more; and determining budgets and targeting criteria for each campaign.

The plans you create will automatically sync with campaign management tools. This means you can easily transition from planning to execution once you gain client buy-in. Simply convert an HCP Planner plan into healthcare campaigns, add your creatives, and launch your pre-optimized campaigns.

Healthcare advertisers are eligible to generate HCP plans in the Planner app at no additional cost.

Note that there is a cost associated with each data partner selection you make while creating in-plan audiences. However, their CPMs only apply when you convert the plan into an IO and campaigns, and those campaigns begin serving impressions against those audiences.

You can locate a data partner’s CPM in the Data Cost section. Refer to Create or manage a Healthcare Professional (HCP) Planner plan to get started, or continue reading for more information on HCP plans.

You’ll define the following required items for each plan, and apply targeting parameters across three optional categories, if desired.

A single plan may contain up to 250 campaigns. Refer to the table below for a list of the elements that are generated for each campaign, and which ones you can update.

*Impacted fields: Changing an editable campaign value impacts other fields, or in certain cases, the entire HCP plan. This column describes which values will change when you update an editable field in a generated plan.

In addition to customized campaigns, HCP plans return forecasting metrics that help you evaluate the potential reach of your campaigns before launching them. You can review these estimates while you build the plan and after you create it, and at the plan level and individual campaign level.

Refer to Key terms and concepts for more information on how your targeting parameters can impact a campaign’s ability to scale and spend.

You can review a plan’s current status on the Plans page of the Planner app. Refer to Manage a plan for more information on how to access this page.

The IQM universe refers to the total targetable audience that you can reach when you use the IQM platform to buy digital ad inventory. This universe changes based on your campaigns’ targeting criteria, and narrows each time you layer on additional targets and blocks. The addressable audience you’re left with after you apply this criteria is represented by your HCP plan’s targeted reach and impressions.

Forecasting metrics provide a sense of scale to help you determine whether you have the right strategies in place to spend your budget in full and achieve campaign objectives. If an HCP plan’s scale isn’t what you were anticipating, or if potential spend is less than your actual budget, then you have the opportunity to make adjustments to your plan and its strategies before you launch a live campaign.

Adjust your targeting criteria, as needed, to reach more of the IQM universe and achieve scale. If the targets you applied are nonnegotiable, consider thinking about the strategies you may need to add to your campaigns to fulfill your budget.

When you create a new HCP plan, you’ll choose up to three methods for adding target users to the plan’s campaigns: Filter Based, Upload NPI List, and/or Existing Audience.

The Filter Based method includes using in-plan filters to create a new, custom audience based on US NPI data.

The Upload NPI List method includes bringing your own CSV file that contains a list of NPIs, and uploading it to create an audience.

The Existing Audience method includes selecting one or more audience types (Matched, Segmented, Account Based) and choosing one or more existing NPI-based audiences. These audiences are ones that you previously created in the Audiences app.

The number of audiences that are created per HCP plan depends on how many Audience Methods you choose, how many sub-types you select (e.g., HCP and Nurse), and how many data partners you select. Refer to the graphic above for an example of how the number of audiences is calculated based on these selections.

When you create an HCP plan and choose the Existing Audience Audience Method, you can add Matched, Segmented, and/or Account Based that you previously created in the Audiences app.

Matched audiences help ensure maximum unique reach to the healthcare professionals who move the needle for your healthcare brand.

HCP Matched audiences deliver industry-leading NPI match rates to reach your campaign’s most relevant healthcare professionals. We directly ingest NPI numbers from leading industry sources, which power our identity graph with over 80% coverage of the HCP universe and result in maximum unique campaign reach.

Review Matched audience overview for more information, and refer to Create an HCP Matched audience (Healthcare) to upload your NPI list in the Audiences app for audience matching.

Healthcare advertisers can create Segmented audiences for precise outreach to healthcare professionals across a number of audience categories. These segments vary by data provider and include NPI-based targeting.

Targeting strategies for Healthcare campaigns can be especially challenging as certain industry professionals don’t have NPI numbers associated with them. For example, you may want to reach nurses who play a major role in educating patients about their treatments and medications. In these instances, you can target nurse audience segments powered by Data360 to reach these healthcare professionals by specialty rather than NPI number. These segments span specialty categories including Diagnosis, Diagnosis Test, Imaging Test, Lab Test, Prescription, Procedure, and Treatment.

Review Segmented audience overview for more information, and refer to Create or manage a Segmented audience to create a new audience in the Audiences app based on user attributes.

Healthcare advertisers can create Account Based audiences, or ABM audiences, to maximize relevance, engagement, and value. These audiences leverage comprehensive hospital data from HealthLink Dimensions (HLD) to pass personalized messages to healthcare professionals at scale, and with a privacy-safe approach.

With ABM audiences, you can craft highly specific healthcare audiences using custom and pre-defined segments based on account-based attributes such as health systems, specialty practices, and NPI reach.

Review Account Based Marketing (ABM) audience overview for more information, and refer to Create or manage an Account Based Marketing (ABM) audience to craft your audience in the Audiences app based on account-based attributes.

In short, “OR” audience relationships mean that a user must meet at least one condition, while “AND” audience relationships mean that a user must meet all of the conditions.

An HCP plan applies an “OR” relationship to each audience type and individual audience. This means that your campaign will target a user if they’re included in any of the targeted audiences, as long as all other campaign targeting criteria are met.

When you create an audience directly from an HCP plan, we’ll prompt you to select one or more data partners for audience matching. You can review key information by partner to help inform what makes the most sense for a given plan. Refer to the table below for more details.

The HCP plan will generate a separate audience for each partner selection.